Rebecca Solnit's classic "A Paradise Built in Hell" seems relevant here, although all the disasters discussed in her book were much, much more localized. But the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" is maybe much less accurate than people think! The 1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire took out most of the city, and the governmental respo…
Rebecca Solnit's classic "A Paradise Built in Hell" seems relevant here, although all the disasters discussed in her book were much, much more localized. But the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" is maybe much less accurate than people think! The 1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire took out most of the city, and the governmental response didn't help, but people seemed to cooperate pretty well. And I think there were efforts by the survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (as opposed to outside help) to get organized, though they had very little to work with.
That said, Solnit's final chapters are on a time when this more optimistic angle didn't work, specifically Katrina. Her analysis was basically "Disaster = cooperation; disaster + racism = dystopian hellscape." COVID updated this to "Disaster + low civic trust = hellscape." So I think we know what situation we'd be in today... and going by your comments about survivalists' attitudes towards urban populations, I think we know how it would have played out if the bomb had dropped in the '70s, too.
...Except maybe in rural Oregon, which seems to have dodged the bombs on that map, and was lily-white. Still pretty much is. Does your game factor in race?
The game doesn't factor in race or gender from the perspective of the player character, because I've tried to avoid ascribing too many properties to the player character. Making it possible to play as a certain gender or race and have the world respond differently would be interesting, of course, but would dramatically ratchet up the complexity of things. So as it is, you can basically imagine the player character to be whatever you want them to be, and the world will regard them pretty neutrally, for better or worse.
But things like gender and race can come up with regards to individual survivors, including their interactions with other survivors if they are "recruitable." And it can come up in regards to the stories that non-recruitable survivors tell.
Makes sense. You generally want blank-slate protagonists anyway for player buy-in. But I'll be really interested to see how the game handles it if the player recruits a streetwise, early-era-hip hop rapper and brings him to a 1980s Willamette valley... It'll be a great reason to put "The Message" on the soundtrack, of course.
Rebecca Solnit's classic "A Paradise Built in Hell" seems relevant here, although all the disasters discussed in her book were much, much more localized. But the whole "civilization is a thin veneer" is maybe much less accurate than people think! The 1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire took out most of the city, and the governmental response didn't help, but people seemed to cooperate pretty well. And I think there were efforts by the survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (as opposed to outside help) to get organized, though they had very little to work with.
That said, Solnit's final chapters are on a time when this more optimistic angle didn't work, specifically Katrina. Her analysis was basically "Disaster = cooperation; disaster + racism = dystopian hellscape." COVID updated this to "Disaster + low civic trust = hellscape." So I think we know what situation we'd be in today... and going by your comments about survivalists' attitudes towards urban populations, I think we know how it would have played out if the bomb had dropped in the '70s, too.
...Except maybe in rural Oregon, which seems to have dodged the bombs on that map, and was lily-white. Still pretty much is. Does your game factor in race?
The game doesn't factor in race or gender from the perspective of the player character, because I've tried to avoid ascribing too many properties to the player character. Making it possible to play as a certain gender or race and have the world respond differently would be interesting, of course, but would dramatically ratchet up the complexity of things. So as it is, you can basically imagine the player character to be whatever you want them to be, and the world will regard them pretty neutrally, for better or worse.
But things like gender and race can come up with regards to individual survivors, including their interactions with other survivors if they are "recruitable." And it can come up in regards to the stories that non-recruitable survivors tell.
Makes sense. You generally want blank-slate protagonists anyway for player buy-in. But I'll be really interested to see how the game handles it if the player recruits a streetwise, early-era-hip hop rapper and brings him to a 1980s Willamette valley... It'll be a great reason to put "The Message" on the soundtrack, of course.